1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates in general to integrated circuits. In one aspect, the present invention relates to a current sensor and method for operating same to measure switching current activity.
2. Description of the Related Art
With today's high performance chip and system designs, there can be significant design challenges caused by digital core power supply noise that is caused by switching currents in the core circuit, depending on how the power is supplied to the chip, package, and board power distribution layers. For example, the inability to accurately determine the die level current draw and/or switching activity of processors and other application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) core circuits is a significant gap in the analysis and design of power delivery networks, resulting in over design or under design of the power delivery networks. Although low frequency methods of direct measurement are available, the large number of power and ground connections on a package makes high frequency measurements extremely difficult. Conventional current sensing solutions use current probes at the output of the regulator to measure current activity, but such probes have limited bandwidth and cannot quantify the switching current activity (referred to as di/dt) with current technologies where switching activity is quite fast. As a result, commercially available probes have limited resolution in profiling power switching activity.
Accordingly, a need exists for an improved circuit, method and system for sensing fast current switching events which addresses various problems in the art that have been discovered by the above-named inventors where various limitations and disadvantages of conventional solutions and technologies will become apparent to one of skill in the art after reviewing the remainder of the present application with reference to the drawings and detailed description which follow, though it should be understood that this description of the related art section is not intended to serve as an admission that the described subject matter is prior art.